I was born in The Netherlands but grew up in Brazil before moving to Australia at the age of 11, giving me a unique accent that no one has ever correctly placed through guesswork. Having lived in three continents (having returned to Europe twice for both a neurosciences medical elective in Berlin and a neurology clinical fellowship in London) has also given me a love for travel and exploring different cultures and especially cuisines in my spare time. My major non-professional ambition is to one day start a travel blog focussing predominantly on food recommendations.

The first patient I saw in medical school was a university professor who lived with multiple sclerosis (MS), and who spent a long time teaching me about his disease experience and how much it had impacted his life, personally and professionally. When I was later exposed to clinical neurology, I quickly became interested in MS, given our ability to provide meaningful treatment to young people who are affected by a disabling illness, often at the peak of their professional and personal lives. By chance I ended up sitting in during Professor Tomas Kalincik’s MS clinic and told him that I have a secret love for mathematics. Needless to say, it was not long before I was learning coding and biostatistics and working on observational studies using large MS datasets. My passion has only grown, and I am now embarking on a PhD hoping to improve outcomes for MS patients.

This is a difficult question as MS research has not been shy of exciting developments in the last decade. However, what excites me most was perhaps the use of observational data to demonstrate that early high-efficacy treatment use can not only delay disability milestones, but can clearly delay and reduce the risk of secondary progressive MS. This to me communicates that all forms of MS are potentially responsive to treatment, as long as we choose the right treatment and start it early enough. The latter part – choosing the right treatment and at the right time – is what I hope to understand better through my research project.

Multiple sclerosis causes significant disability mainly to young people through autoimmune damage to the central nervous system. Novel treatments are effective in reducing disease activity. By analysing large datasets of MS patients, as well as a deeply phenotyped Australian cohort, we hope to optimise its treatment; in particular, our project sets out to understand early markers of treatment success, how to best manage failure of our most potent treatments, and how to predict and optimally treat progressive MS. This will lead to better outcomes and less disability for our patients.

Our research project focusses on clinical management of MS using observational data from international MS patient cohorts and a deeply phenotyped Australian cohort. We endeavour to better understand how to optimise treatment of MS using current high-efficacy disease-modifying therapies; specifically, by addressing optimal treatment strategies following failure of these treatments, exploring potential early treatment targets with long-term prognostic value, and further evaluating the role and optimal use of therapies in progressive MS forms. We hope to improve outcomes for patients with active MS refractory to our most effective treatments and reduce their risk of further relapses and disability accumulation, identify meaningful early treatment targets to optimise treatment decisions from disease onset and improve patients’ long-term prognosis, and to advance our understanding of and ability to predict, prevent and manage progressive forms of MS. We hope this research will meaningfully improve disability outcomes for people living with MS.

I am writing this just as I embark on the start of my PhD and research career, and I am sure I will have much to add to this question over the coming years. But so far, I have really enjoyed that the research I have done and am embarking on is directly relevant to the patients I see day-to-day as a neurology registrar (and shortly as a qualified neurologist), and that I can discuss the latest evidence with patients I see in clinic. The greatest challenge I have faced so far was undertaking research while completing my medical training – it has always been very difficult to find time for research on top of full-time study or full-time work as a doctor-in-training. I am very excited to be commencing a PhD, with the help of MS Australia, which will allow me to finally dedicate my weekday working hours to research.